I committed this blog currently to examine and bring to light as many aspects of anxiety and stress as I could find in my travels over the internet. There are many concepts of stress and anxiety, many clinical, most philosophical. If you have a condition like Bi Polar or serious phobia’s this post and the article that inspired, it really don’t apply to you. If you are like me, someone who has anxiety to various degree’s you might find some value.
Yes, how to handle stress like a nascar pit crew member…. From the article: “Stress is not bad,” he says. “It’s not good either. It’s how you interpret it.” Lyles defines stress as “any opposing force, potentially limiting forward progress.” Professional athletes thrive on stress, but they don’t call it that. “They call it ‘competition,’” he says.
Now I don’t prescribe to this notion that stress is competition. In context, yes athletes would put it in a competitive light. What about those of us who are not professional athletes? How do we transpose our stress to competition?
The article at its core is actually very good. It uses some decent analogies, but the essence of the theory is you must be able to identify your triggers and trigger situations (the article calls it leakage) to create the competition context.
Thus, the preface paragraph on this blog post, this isn’t meant for someone with a clinical diagnosis or more potent form of mental illness. This is really meant for those of us functioning with anxiety.
The general premise is, most of your daily life, let’s say 75% is a series of predictable events. You normally do the same things everyday right? Within those events stress and anxiety happens when something else enters the equation. AS a bad example, you brush your teeth every morning and this morning you are out of tooth paste.
The point is within the predictable events equation you can identify places where most anxiety happens to you. Is it when you go out to travel to work? Is it when you go to eat lunch? What ever it is, the “competition” is to prepare for and defeat the unpredictable that happen during your routine.
It’s an interesting read to say the least. I got some value out of it and I thought it was prudent to bring it to my readers. I think we are all on the path of trying to become more self-aware, that’s why we read blogs, and write them right?
I’m not sure creating an internal competitive environment is the best way to go for all of us, but it might be for some. I did take pause to reflect on my stress predictability based on my personal routine and I found one, the rush for the bathroom in my house on Wednesday mornings. I will get up earlier now.
Small victories…. You are doing great, remember, one day at a time.
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